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Excerpt from 'Running Away'

Running Away

Dalkey Archive Press

Chapter One

Would it ever end with Marie? The summer before we broke up
I spent a few weeks in Shanghai, but it wasn't really a business trip, more a
pleasure junket, even if Marie had given me a sort of mission (but I don't feel
like going into details). The day I arrived in Shanghai, Zhang Xiangzhi, a
business associate of Marie's, was there to meet me at the airport. I'd only
seen him once before, in Paris, at Marie's office, but I recognized him
immediately, he was talking to a uniformed police officer just past customs. He
had to be in his forties, round cheeks, facial features swollen, smooth,
copper-colored skin, and he wore very dark sunglasses that seemed too big for
his small face. We were waiting at the edge of the baggage carousel for my bag
and we'd hardly exchanged a few words in broken English before he handed me a
cell phone. Present for you, he told me, which plunged me into a state of
extreme bewilderment. I didn't really understand why he felt the need to give me
a cell phone, a used cell phone, rather ugly, dull gray, without packaging or
instructions. To keep an eye on me, be able to locate me at any time, watch my
every move? I don't know. I followed him silently through the airport terminal,
and I felt a sense of unease, heightened by jet lag and the tension that comes
with arriving in an unknown city.

On exiting the airport, Zhang Xiangzhi made a quick gesture with his hand and
a shiny new gray Mercedes slowly rolled up to us. He got in behind the wheel,
sending the driver, a young guy with a fluid, scarcely noticeable presence, to
the back seat after having placed my bag in the trunk. Seated at the wheel,
Zhang Xiangzhi invited me to join him in the front, and I sat beside him on a
comfortable, cream-leather seat with armrests and a new-car scent while he tried
to adjust the air conditioning, which, after fiddling with a digital touch pad,
began humming softly in the vehicle. I handed him the manila envelope that Marie
had asked me to give him (which contained twenty-five thousand dollars cash). He
opened it, thumbed quickly through the bundles to count the bills, then resealed
the envelope before putting it in his back pocket. He fastened his seat belt and
we left the airport slowly to get on the freeway in the direction of Shanghai.
We didn't say a word, he didn't speak French and his English was poor. He wore a
gray short-sleeved shirt and a small gold chain with a pendant in the shape of a
stylized claw or dragon's talon around his neck. I still had the cell phone he
had given me, it was on my lap, I didn't know what to do with it or why it had
even been offered to me in the first place (just a Welcome to China gift?). I
was aware of the fact that Zhang Xiangzhi had been overseeing Marie's
real-estate investments in China for a few years now, some possibly dishonest
and illicit activities, renting out and selling commercial leases, purchasing
building space in rundown areas, the whole thing probably tainted by corruption
and all sorts of clandestine exchanges of money. Since her first bouts of
success in Asia, in Korea and Japan, Marie had set up shop in Hong Kong and
Beijing and had been hoping to acquire new storefronts in Shanghai and in the
south of China, with plans underway to open branches in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
For the time being, however, I hadn't heard anything about Zhang Xiangzhi being
involved in organized crime.

On arriving at the Hansen Hotel, where a room had been reserved for me, Zhang
Xiangzhi parked the Mercedes in the hotel's private interior courtyard and went
to grab my bag from the trunk before ushering me all the way to the front desk.
He hadn't been involved in any way with reserving the room, which was done from
Paris by a travel agency (a one-week, fully planned "escapade" with hotel and
flight included, to which I added an extra week of vacation for my own
enjoyment), but now he was seeing to everything, having me step aside as he took
care of the arrangements. He had me wait on a couch while he went alone to the
front desk to check me in. I sat there waiting in the lobby, next to a
depressing display of dusty plants withering in flowerpots, and I watched him
listlessly as he filled out my registration information. At one point he walked
over to me, hurried, concerned, his hand reaching out anxiously, to ask me for
my passport. He walked back to the front desk and I kept an eye on my passport,
watching it with some concern as it passed from hand to hand, worried that I
might see it spirited out of the hands of one of the numerous employees
shuffling behind the counter. After a few more minutes of waiting, Zhang
Xiangzhi came back over to me with the magnetic key card for my room. It was
enclosed in a red and white case adorned with carefully formed Chinese
characters, but he didn't give it to me, he kept it in his hand. He grabbed my
bag and invited me to follow him, and we headed to the elevators to go up to my
room.

It was a three-star hotel, clean and quiet, we didn't see a single person on
our floor, I followed Zhang Xiangzhi down a long deserted hall, an abandoned
housekeeping cart blocked our way. Zhang Xiangzhi slid the magnetic card through
the lock and we entered my room (very dark, the curtains were drawn). I fiddled
with the light at the door but the dimmer switch turned without effect. I tried
to turn on the bedside lamp, but there was no electricity in the room. Zhang
Xiangzhi pointed at a little receptacle on the wall next to the door in which
one was meant to insert the key card in order to turn on the electricity. To
demonstrate, he slowly inserted the card into the little slot and all the lights
lit up at once, in the closet as well as the bathroom, the air conditioner
loudly began to emit cool air, and the bathroom fan turned on. Zhang Xiangzhi
went to open the curtains and stood at the window for a moment, pensive, looking
at the new Mercedes parked in the courtyard below. Then he turned back around,
as if to leave-or so I thought. He sat down in the armchair, crossed his legs,
and took out his own cell phone, and, without appearing to be inconvenienced in
any way by my presence (I was standing in the middle of the room, exhausted from
my trip, I wanted to shower and stretch out on the bed) he began dialing a
number, closely following the instructions on a blue phone card that had the
letters "IP" written on it, followed by various codes and Chinese characters. He
needed to start over a couple of times before getting it right, and then,
gesturing emphatically in my direction, he called me over, had me run to his
side, so that he could hand me the phone. I didn't know what to say, where to
speak, to whom or in what language I would be speaking, before hearing a female
voice say allo, apparently in French, allo, she repeated.
Allo, I finally said. Allo, she said. Our confusion was now
complete (I was beginning to feel uneasy). Marie? With his sharp and focused
eyes aimed at me, Zhang Xiangzhi was prodding me to talk, assuring me that it
was Marie on the line-Marie, Marie, he was repeating while pointing at the
phone-and I finally understood that he had dialed Marie's number in Paris (her
office number, the only one that he had) and that I was talking to a secretary
at the haute-couture house Let's Go Go Go. But I didn't feel like talking
to Marie right now, not at all, especially in front of Zhang Xiangzhi. Feeling
more and more uneasy, I wanted to hang up, but I didn't know which button to
push or how to stop the conversation, so I quickly tossed him the phone as
though it were white-hot. He hung it up, brusquely snapped it shut, pensive. He
retrieved it from his lap, brushed it on the back of his hand as if to dust it
off, and leaned forward to hand it to me without leaving his chair. For
you, he told me, and he explained to me in English that, if I wanted to make
a call, I should always use this card, dial 17910, then 2 for instructions in
English (1 for Mandarin, if I preferred), the card's number, followed by his
PIN, 4447, then 00 for international, 33 for France, and then the number itself,
etc. Understand? he asked. I said yes, more or less (maybe not all the
details, but I got the gist of it). If I wanted to make a call, I should always
use this card-always, he insisted-and, pointing to the room's old landline phone
on the bedside table, he shook his finger, saying no forcefully, like an order
or command. No, he said. Understand? No. Never. Very expensive, he
said, very very expensive.

In the following days, Zhang Xiangzhi called me only once or twice on the
cell phone he had given me to see how I was doing and to invite me to lunch.
Since my arrival, I had spent most of my time alone in Shanghai, not doing much,
not meeting anyone. I'd walk around the city, eating at random times and places,
seasoned kidney skewers on street corners, burning hot bowls of noodles in tiny
hole-in-the-wall places packed with people, sometimes more elaborate meals in
luxurious hotel restaurants, slowly working my way through the menus in deserted
kitsch dining halls. In the afternoon, I'd take a nap in my room, not going back
out until nightfall when it would get a little cooler. I'd go for a walk in the
mild night, lost in thought, strolling alongside the multicolored neon-lit shops
of Nanjing Road, indifferent to the noise and constant activity. Drawn to the
river, I'd always end up in the Bund, welcomed by its maritime atmosphere and
sea breeze. I'd cross through the underground passageway and amble aimlessly
along the river, letting my eyes fall upon the row of old European buildings
whose green lights, reflected on the wavy water of the Huangpu, projected
emerald halos in the night. From the other bank of the river, beyond the flow
littered with vegetable waste stagnating in the darkness, beyond the chunks of
mud floating on the surface of the water and the algae magically held in place
by an invisible undertow, the skyscrapers of Pudong traced a futuristic line in
the sky as fateful as the lines that mark our palms, punctuated by the
distinctive sphere of the Oriental Pearl, and, further along on the right, as if
in retreat, modest and hardly lit up, the discreet majesty of the Jin Mao Tower.
Looking out at the water, pensive, I was captivated by the river's dark and wavy
surface, and in a state of dreamlike melancholy-as often happens when the
thought of love is met with the spectacle of dark water in the night-I was
thinking about Marie.

Was it already a lost cause with Marie? And what could I have known about it
then?

I hadn't originally planned to go to Beijing during this trip, it was a
spontaneous decision to spend a few days there. Zhang Xiangzhi had called one
night inviting me at a moment's notice to an art gallery opening. The exhibition
was held on the outskirts of the city, in a former warehouse that now served as
a contemporary art space, where a few artists had installed these mobile video
installations, projectors attached to metal ceiling shafts, slowly swinging
through the emptiness of the dark warehouse, causing projected images to
converge on the walls before splitting and spreading apart only to come together
and reform again. That's where I met Li Qi. She was sitting on the cement floor,
her back against the wall, alone in the room, long black hair and cream leather
jacket. I noticed her presence immediately but didn't speak to her until later,
next to the refreshments, Australian wines and bottles of Chinese beer stacked
on a trestle table also holding various fliers and art catalogues. She had
noticed that I wasn't Chinese (her perspicacity amused me-and what makes you
think that? I asked her). Your smile, she said, your small trace of a smile (all
of this in English, maintaining that same small trace of a smile which came
irrepressibly to our lips when we first started talking, set off by nothing in
particular and seeming to feed continuously now on what was really rather benign
fuel). We had gone to sit down on a bench in a vacant area outside the gallery
with two bottles of Tsingtao, then four, then six, then night, unhurriedly,
fell, and we were still together, our silhouettes like shadow puppets which
couldn't have been more Chinese, lit up intermittently by the shifting play of
liquid light, green and red, coming from the moving videos inside the gallery.
Sound checks could be heard from the warehouse, and sharp bursts of Chinese
heavy metal suddenly filled the calm surroundings of the summer night, causing
glass panes to vibrate and sending grasshoppers flying in the warmth of the air.
It became difficult to hear one another on the bench and I moved closer to her,
but, rather than raising my voice to speak over the music, I continued to talk
to her in a low voice, her hair tickling my face, my lips close to her ear, I
could smell the scent of her skin, could almost feel the touch of her cheek, and
she showed no sign of resistance, sitting still, not making the slightest effort
to lean away-I could see her eyes in the dark night staring off into the
distance while listening to me-and I understood then that something was
beginning to develop between us. She explained to me that she had to go back to
Beijing the next day for her work and suggested that I go with her, I could just
stay a night or two, nothing would keep me from going back to Shanghai the day
after tomorrow, the night train was comfortable and inexpensive-and, in any
case, I didn't have anything in particular to do in Shanghai, right? I took a
minute to think, not too long, before smiling at her, looking into her eyes to
question the exact nature of her offer and its latent-albeit implicit, already
pleasurable-amorous innuendos.

I checked out of my hotel in the evening of the day of my departure. I didn't
bring any luggage, only a bag with a few toiletries, as well as the cell phone
I'd been given, and which never rang (besides, nobody had my number apart from
Xiangzhi and Marie). Since I still had a lot of time, I took a bus to the train
station rather than take a taxi, and I watched the streets of Shanghai file by
through the window in the orange-tinted twilight of sunset.

Li Qi and I had planned to meet in front of the Shanghai railway station, but
we might as well have planned to meet "in China": Thousands of people were
swarming in every direction, heading toward the subway or bus station entrances,
entering and exiting the illuminated glass structure of the station, while,
alongside it, hundreds of passengers crowded in the shade against its
transparent walls, crouching and still, with a sort of dark and restrained look,
farmers and seasonal workers who had just arrived or were waiting for the night
train with bags and sacks at their feet, worn, split open, untied, crates and
overstuffed cardboard boxes, jute sacks spewing over, bundles, gear, here and
there a loosely knotted tarp with pots and portable stoves spilling out.
Searching for Li Qi in a stifling heat that smelled like dirty clothes, I felt
as though I were the object of countless whispers and furtive glances. An aging
homeless women stood by my side without moving, leaning on a large wooden
crutch, head held stubbornly high, hunched over with her hand out, eyes
infinitely sad. I was beginning to think that Li Qi wouldn't show-it had all
been so quick: the night before, we hadn't even really gotten to know each
other-when I finally spotted her in the distance, cutting through the crowd to
get to me, picking up her pace the last few meters. She grabbed my arm, out of
breath, smiling, she was wearing a light, loose-fitting khaki jacket, hardly a
jacket, more like a blouse whose opening revealed a tight black undershirt, and,
on her neck, I noticed a tiny spark of jade shinning on her naked skin. But,
practically at the same time, a few meters behind her, in her wake so to speak,
I caught sight of Zhang Xiangzhi, with his black sunglasses, trailing
unhurriedly behind her in the night. I didn't understand what was going on, and
I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of uneasiness, irritation, and uncertainty.
After having greeted me with a smile that seemed ironic, maybe even mocking, as
if wanting me to acknowledge the bad trick he had played on me-or the trick I
had tried to play on him, which he hadn't fallen for-Zhang Xiangzhi stepped away
to make a call on his cell phone. What was he doing here? Had he simply
accompanied Li Qi to the train station? There was certainly nothing surprising
about the fact that Li Qi and Zhang Xiangzhi knew each other (it was through him
that I had met her, after all), but I couldn't understand how he had found out
about our trip-and I was even more taken aback when Li Qi informed me that he
was coming along with us to Beijing.